RECAP: my eighth week at a small newspaper

Monday, June 23 and Tuesday, June 24:
These were the two days I was working before I went on my vacation and I don’t particularly remember the details of what I did, but I know that I did write 2 stories for that week’s paper and one of which I’m pretty proud of so I wanted to talk about it!

There is an eleven-year-old boy who received a ‘Great Kid Award’, beating out 450 other nominees across the province, so I got to interview his mom and then meet and interview him and I thought it was really so much fun. His mother was so nice and he, honestly for an eleven-year-old kid, he has so many ideas and dreams and it’s really inspiring.

I ended up writing the story in a pretty soft-lead kind of way, and I was worried that wouldn’t go well, but it did and then the mom ended up emailing / calling me while I was away on vacation and telling me that they really loved the article and they thought I wrote it well and represented her son well and that the photos I took were great too!

So I was really happy about and proud about that because you know, as a summer intern, I appreciate all feedback and criticism or compliments on what I write and this was technically the first one I received on a story I’ve written here to date, so it was a big deal for me.

My editor ended up emailing me the original email that the mom sent (she didn’t know my email address so she sent it to the editor) and he wrote ‘Well deserved kudos!’ So that felt great too!

The other story I wrote that week was just a ‘What’s going on in the city for Canada Day’ type of story so I didn’t think it was that great but it was put on a Canada Day spread with a bunch of red and I thought that looked pretty cool.

What I learned this week:
When people like your story and they tell you, it’s a really great feeling!